le
come on her lately. I presume you've heard something about that matter?"

She nodded.

"I suppose now," went on the postmaster, his features sharpening with
curiosity, "that the Federal authorities ain't looking into that
particular matter? Not that I care to know myself, but I just thought it
wouldn't be any harm to ask."

"No," said Miss Smith, "I merely wanted to see her on a personal matter
and I only let you see my credential in order to learn her forwarding
address."

Provided with the requisite information, she figured that before night
she would interview the widow or know good reasons why. That the other
woman had quitted her home seemingly in a hurry and with efforts at
secrecy gave zest to the quest and added a trace of bepuzzlement to it
too. Even so, she did not herself know what she meant to say to the
woman when she had found her in her present abiding place or what
questions she would ask. Only she knew that an inner prompting stronger
than any reasoned-out process drove her forward upon her vague and
blinded mission. Fool's errand it might be--probably was--yet she meant
to see it through.

But she had not reckoned upon the contingency that on this fine October
forenoon, for the first time since buying his new touring car, Mr. Jake
Goebel, shirt-waist manufacturer in a small way in Broome Street and
head of a family in a large way in West One Hundred and Ninety-ninth
Street, would be undertaking to drive the said car unaided and untutored
by a more experienced charioteer on a trial spin up the Albany Post
Road, accompanied--it being merely a five-passenger car--only by Mrs.
Rosa Goebel, wife of the above, six little Goebels of assorted sizes and
ages and Mrs. Goebel's unmated sister, Miss Freda Hirschfeld of
Rivington Street. In Getty Square, Yonkers, about noontime occurred a
head-on collision, the subsequent upshots of which were variously that
divers of those figuring in the accident went in the following
directions:

Miss Smith to a doctor's office near by to have a sprained wrist
bandaged; and thence home in a hired automobile.

Her runabout to a Yonkers repair shop and garage.

Mr. Goebel, with lamentations, to the office of an attorney making a
specialty of handling damage suits, thence home by train with the seven
members of his family party, all uninjured as to their limbs and members
but in a highly distracted state nervously.

Mr. Goebel's car to another repair shop and garag